Cleveland Museum of Natural History goes on a goodwill expedition

Museum's $125M campaign taps business
community

Lubrizol CEO James Hambrick, center, is shown with A. Chace Anderson of CM Wealth Advisors and Evalyn Gates of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

The Cleveland Museum of Natural History is going on an expedition — not for dinosaur or woolly mammoth bones, but for big-dollar donations from the wallets of Northeast Ohio's business leaders.
The museum recently launched a $125 million capital campaign to finance an exhaustive renovation and expansion program over the next five to seven years. It's the museum's largest fundraising effort in its 92-year history, and it's going to take some major bones to make it happen.
So, for the first time, the museum is making a concerted pitch to the region's business and philanthropic community that links an investment in the museum to an investment in the region's future work force.
As such, museum leaders are banking on face-time with local corporate leaders to urge them to pony up.
“We have the chance to do things here that impact children and adults that they can't do in a classroom,” said Evalyn Gates, who joined the museum as its executive director and CEO in 2010. “It makes science come alive.”
To embolden the pitch, the museum drafted Lubrizol Corp. chairman and CEO James Hambrick — a chemical engineer by trade and an amateur cosmologist by choice — to co-chair the fundraising effort and, perhaps, to tap his Rolodex for any contacts willing to contribute to the campaign.
Mr. Hambrick, a native Texan who said he was inspired by Houston's natural history museum at a young age, personally contributed $5 million to the effort.
“There's such a diversity of opportunities to create that inquisitive spark in a young mind at a natural history museum,” Mr. Hambrick said. “It sparked an interest (in science) in me at a young age. That developed and widened over time.”
The natural history museum, which sits a stone's throw away from the Cleveland Museum of Art on Wade Oval in the city's University Circle neighborhood, hasn't undergone a top-to-bottom renovation in decades. The museum moved in the 1950s from Euclid Avenue to University Circle, where it has seen a hodgepodge of upgrades over the years — such as a $300,000 technology upgrade to the museum's planetarium in 2010 — but nothing quite as dramatic as the project in the works.
The idea, according to Dr. Gates, is to bring the “equivalent of the planetarium to the whole museum.”

A magnet for visitors

The museum quietly has been building toward the renovation and expansion effort for several years with plans already on the drawing board upon Dr. Gates arrival from the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. Dr. Gates re-evaluated the plans and called for a more interactive and immersive proposal.
“Education is not a passive endeavor,” she said.
The museum's expansion and renovation plans, which still are evolving, aren't expected to expand greatly the museum's square footage— an increase to 274,000 square feet from about 214,000. However, the changes as envisioned would produce a bevy of enhanced exhibit spaces. Plans call for the construction of two new two-story wings that will house exhibits and collections, a striking glass-enclosed lobby and a new parking garage.
The museum's labs also will be exposed and integrated into the galleries, allowing visitors to see the museum's scientists at work.
“If we do this right, people will want to come to Cleveland just to see the building,” said Peter Anagnostos, who joined the museum seven months ago as its chief development officer to help guide the ambitious fundraising effort.
With Northeast Ohio's reputation as a hub for biomedical innovation and a heap of other sectors rooted in science, museum officials hope they can sell business leaders on the prospect that their donations would be investments in a 21st century regional work force.
The group also is looking to build on the momentum of the passage of an operating levy last fall to support a reform effort for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District.
“Moving the Cleveland municipal schools forward was just one part of the equation,” Lubrizol's Mr. Hambrick said. “This is just another pillar in that overall, long-term solution of engaging our youth and exciting them about science education.”

Competitive marketplace

Cleveland hosts a horde of cultural and research institutions vying for philanthropic dollars, and the natural history museum's quest for a slice of the wealth could come as a challenge, according to Stuart Mendel, director of the Center for Nonprofit Policy & Practice at Cleveland State University. The Cleveland Museum of Art, for one, is in the final stretch of its $350 million capital campaign — an effort that launched back in 2005.
“They have probably the best talent and the best product, and it's taken them this long to raise that much money,” Dr. Mendel said of the art museum. “The natural history museum is a good place. It's a good institution and well-run and its plan is great. They're just in a marketplace competing for the same dollars. It's about whose ideas win.”
Museum officials admit the fundraising effort could be a challenge, but believe they've put together a team that can meet that $125 million goal. Mr. Anagnostos joined the team with 25 years in fundraising experience, which included stints at Cleveland State University, John Carroll University and Harvard Medical School. He also added four staff positions to the museum's fundraising division.
Mr. Anagnostos said the biggest challenge is lining up calendars that will allow him and his staff to get in front of movers and shakers.
“Cleveland is a very philanthropic community,” he said. “We just have to get out there and get our message to each person.”